Noise; Preset Patches - Boss

GT-X Setup Manual

Section 15 Overdrive/Distortion
distortions give differing amounts of distortion for the same
drive figure. Well, there are two things affecting this, firstly
as described above is the clipping characteristics that are
used—the form of the clip itself, and secondly is where the
clipping threshold is. There is no guarantee that the clipping
threshold is the same on each of the distortions. Indeed, in
all probability it is different. Thus drive 35 on one distortion
is not equivalent to drive 35 on another.
The GT-3/5 manual provides reasonable descriptions of the
overdrives/distortions and I have nothing to add to them.
One question that may arise if what is the difference
between overdrive, distortion and fuzz? Well, the answer
really is not much technically. Most of the difference is how
the amount of distortion is perceived. Overdrive tends to be
light-middle distortions, distortion tends to be middle-heavy
and extreme distortions tend to come out as fuzz. The
names do (I think) tend to characterise the distortions pretty
well.
For tone analysis once again I have grouped the effects into
several groups. These
dist=50,bass=0,treble=0,level=50. Increasing/decreasing the
drive doesn't change the frequency response much. Here are
the images:
[GTx-OD-Overdrive.jpg]
Natural OD
Vintage OD
Turbo OD
[GTx-OD-BluesCrunch.jpg]
Blues
Crunch
[GTx-OD-DistGrunge.jpg]
Distortion 1
Distortion 2
Grunge
[GTx-OD_MetalFuzz.jpg]
Metal 1
Metal 2
Fuzz
I will say this—Turbo OD, Grunge and Metal 1 are my
favourites. Oh, BTW one thing to note – the more distortion
you use the less defined individual tones become. So
picking with Turbo OD allows much more tone and
definition of the note than when picking with Fuzz. The
same is true within a single distortion. A drive of 30 will
give much more tone and definition than a drive of 80. It's
all horses for courses really and (once again) you need to
experiment to find the sound you want. If you think hard
about the way you would describe the sound, then you will
find yourself saying things like 'hard edged distortion' or
© Copyright 2000-2002 Barry S. Pearce et al.
were measured with
'fuzzy' or 'light distortion' and these can lead you into the
distortions that you should use as a starting point.
There are 11 internal distortions and 12 preamps!!!! It is
very likely that you will find what you want in amongst this
lot. You might need to tweak further, EQ perhaps etc but
you should still find a distortion that meets your needs here.
Also don't forget that there is no reason not to use a
distortion with a distorting preamp—again it's all down to
experimentation.

Noise

It is appropriate at this point to talk about noise. As I have
said above, the distortion is generated through gain control.
Thus in order to generate large amounts of distortion we
need large amounts of gain. The problem that can arise here
is that any noise that occurs before the distortion will be
amplified. Thus more gain more noise. This is why we
concentrated so much on noise elimination in section 9.
Now if you are using high levels of distortion/gain you
*will* get some additional noise. However, the GT-3/5s
distortions do vary in their characteristics. Thus by
changing to a different distortion you may be able to obtain
the same level of distortion for less drive and possibly less
noise. You really need to experiment to find out what works
best.
In all cases a change of gain does mean a change of noise
and a change of signal level thus requiring a change to the
Noise Suppressor set-up.
I have NOT found it possible to induce the YUK noise
which I describe fully in section 16 below. It seems to be a
preamp only problem.

Preset Patches

We have already seen two patches in earlier sections that
use the OD/DS as the main distortion and use a clean
preamp to colour the sound; these are [GT-3]'Metal Chop'
and 'Metal Dist*'. Also, we already have a patch that allows
us to use the external effects loop—this one is 'Ext FX
Loop' and I introduced that earlier too.
Rather than just present more of the same on the patch
front, I think the best thing to do is take 'Metal Dist*' and
just change the OD/DS that has been used. This will give
you a good idea of the available distortions.
Once again, to round up we will take a look at some of the
preset patches:
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